Introduction On a hot August night in the remote town of Makin in Pak- istan’s South Waziristan tribal region, a short and stocky bearded man, hooked up to an intravenous drip, lay on a cot on the rooftop of a vast house. A young woman in her late teens massaged his legs. Nearby a Predator drone hovered in the clear sky, then zoomed in on the couple. Thousands of miles away, at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, an oper- ator sitting in front of a monitoring screen fired a Hellfire mis- sile from the drone, killing the couple instantly. Only the man’s torso was later found, the lower half of his body having been eviscerated. The young woman’s body was shredded entirely. The precision strike, carried out on August 5, 2009, killed Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban move- ment, and his young wife of less than a year. He was being treated that night for a kidney ailment. Baitullah was one of the most powerful of the radical Islamic militant command- ers operating out of the remote tribal regions of Pakistan, on the border of Afghanistan. They had been launching a steady stream of attacks on the US. forces fighting in Afghanistan and had unleashed a wave of terror within Pakistan. Baitullah was blamed for the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Decem- ber 2007 and had claimed responsibility for a series of suicideIntroduction N attacks on Pakistani security forces and defense ins as successor had also reportedly been ites a ning of the suicide bombing of a remote CIA ii ward Operating Base Chapman, in Khost, Afghanist, December 30, 2009, that killed seven CIA officers. eee of the worst attacks in hi i i istory against U.S. intellige cials. a lations the plan. installation For. It was one Baitullah had declared that his ultimate aim was to attack New York and Washington. “It is a duty of every Muslim to wage jihad against the infidel forces of America and Brie ain,” he said in 2007, in his first television interview, in which he appeared with his face covered. The failed Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad said that he attempted the bombing in part as revenge for the killing of Baitullah as well as that of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq.’ The CIA was authorized by President Barack Obama to strike Baitullah immediately if it got a clear shot,’ and as part of a dramatic escalation of drone surveillance in the tribal region, nine drones had been assigned to target him. The unmanned aerial vehicles known as Predator drones are able to track moving targets in real time, and their striking ability is extremely precise. The Americans have been fighting Islamic militant groups waging an insurgency in Afghanistan and Pakistan since the beginning of the war in Afghanistan in October 2001. Dur ing most of that time the United States considered Baitullah a lesser threat than a number of other militant leaders. Most of his attacks were carried out inside Pakistan rather than against USS. and NATO troops in Afghanistan, which was the focus of U.S. concern, and Washington had turned down repeated Pakistani requests to target him.’ But the American position on him had changed as his power steadily grew and concetns eed that escalating militant violence within PakistanIntroduction might destabilize the Pakistani government, throwing the region into even worse turmoil. Some suspected Baitullah’s men of attacking the supply convoys for U.S. and NATO forces that traveled through Pakistan on the way to Afghanistan. Two months before his death, in June 2009, Baitullah had narrowly escaped a strike when Hellfire missiles hit the funeral of an important Taliban leader who had been killed in an ear- lier strike. It turned out that Baitullah had left the funeral site only moments earlier. The killing of Baitullah was perhaps the most successful strike in the eight-year history of drone operations in Paki- stan. It was seen as a victory particularly for President Obama, who had ordered the escalation of the strikes in January 2009, shortly after his inauguration, as part of his overall review of the Afghan war strategy. Many other Taliban command- ers and al Qaeda leaders have been killed by the strikes, most prominent among them three al Qaeda leaders—Abu Laith al-Libbi, Usama al-Kini, and Mustafa Abu al-Yazid—who were the masterminds of al Qaeda’s terrorist attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The drone campaign has been hailed as a resounding suc- cess by some counterterrorism officials. On March 17, 2010, CIA director Leon Panetta described the raids as “the most aggressive operation that the CIA has been involved in in our history.” He claimed that the campaign had thrown al Qaeda into complete disarray.‘ But others view the success of the campaign, and the larger success and wisdom of the current US. Af-Pak strategy, very differently. The decision to step up the drone strikes was part of a grow- ing recognition by the United States that the tribal territories in Pakistan have become, as Obama put it in his announce- ment of the new surge strategy in December 2009, the epicen- ter of the militant operations that have wreaked havoc both